[To face p. 200.
A MEDIÆVAL ASTRONOMER.
From a painting by Gerard Dow.
Cecco d’Ascoli d. 1327.
One of their duties was to provide “judgments” (i.e. to cast the horoscope) gratis for students. But the dignity was a perilous one. Legitimate prediction by astrology bordered close on necromancy, which was banned by the Church, and one of Bologna’s most famous professors in astrology, the learned Cecco d’Ascoli, was burned at the stake in Florence in 1327 for the crime of sorcery.
Astronomy, like other subjects, was taught chiefly by lectures and “repetitions,” or classes for catechizing the students on what they had already heard. Books could also be had, though they were dear, on hire or purchase, from the university “stationers” or librarians.
The first books on Greek astronomy which found their way into European universities were Latin translations of Arabic commentaries and paraphrases of Aristotle, which travelled from Moorish academies in Spain to Paris. The astronomical treatises with strange technical terms in Arabic were hard work to translate, especially when they had already passed through several languages, as often happened. Thus it was possible to possess a work of Aristotle which was a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of a commentary upon an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the original Greek text!
Urban IV., pope 1261-1264.
But meanwhile some of Aristotle’s works in the Greek entered Italy from the East, as a result of the crusading conquest of Constantinople in 1204. The first translations of these into Latin were very poor, but later on St. Thomas Aquinas, with the help of Pope Urban IV., had a better version made.